GOOGLE CALENDAR ENLIGHTENS EDUCATION

Google’s online class calendar is the best way for teachers to take advantage of their web presence and achieve transparency between the classroom and their students’ learning outside the classroom. Students can check project requirements, homework assignments and test due dates at home. Teachers writing assignments on the board, forcing students to use their paper planners, are actually preparing their students for a world that no longer exists. If there are any work environments which still require that skill, be sure they will be out of business before these kids graduate. These hyper-scheduled students need the ability to manage their activities electronically.

On the teacher plane, the maintenance of a calendar is yet another cumbersome task, ready to suck time out of an already overtaxed schedule. Or is it?

A variety of methods teachers adopt to keep track of what they are doing. Some plan their class schedules on napkins, some use desk calendars, and others use picture perfect, graduate school template lesson plans. To eliminate the time drain, teachers need a tool to direct their plan to a calendar that can be used for both planning and announcing. Google calendar presents the perfect solution to online class calendars.

Teachers handling five sections often have to duplicate events across five calendars. They don’t have the time to click between five different monthly calendars; they need to see all five class events in one month, toggling on and off each class. They need to copy events from one section to others with less than three clicks. They need to make the class calendar open to both students and parents. It would also help if the calendar could send e-mail reminders that take less than two clicks to activate.

• With just a click, copy and paste, teachers can throw some gobbledygook code into their website, and their class calendar appears on their page in the school’s website. Once the calendar is embedded, the teacher never has to worry about it. They can post and copy events or change dates with ease.
• Students, creating their own Google account, can “add” a teacher’s class calendar to their own. By putting the calendar on their customized iGoogle page, their class assignments are always right in front of them. Students athletes who know what they are doing can grab their team’s schedule from one of those school sports scheduling sites and put their games and practices right alongside their assignments.

• Teachers and students can invite guardians/people to circulate information about a particular event without sharing entire calendar with others. It also allows you to track the responses of the people you have invited. Whenever you make a change, your invitee will also be notified of that change in their calendar, email, or their selected mode of notification. In a way, Google Calendar makes it easy to coordinate meetings with others at your school – you can quickly view free/busy information for many people at once to find a time that works for everyone.
•  Publish calendar as a webpage and make available to non-Google Calendar user. Easy to create new events, set up reminders (pop up, SMS, or email), set up repeating events and more. Share the calendar with read only access, or grant someone else the facility to edit your calendar too.

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